Freshly Picked: Weekly Link Roundup Jun 24, 2016

Newsy and Resourceful

Drift: What I Learned About Writing Copy From 146,693 Emails and 50 Blog Posts
“instead of that Mad Libs style approach to writing copy, we started listening to our customers and using the words they were actually using. And we stopped worrying about writing “killer” copy.Instead, we’re worried about writing in a way that our prospects and customers will actually understand.” (read, via )

Hiten Shah: Free eBook – Content Marketing Playbook
“Content marketing isn’t scary. When you strip away all the misinformation and hype, it’s really just about helping people solve problems. But to turn it into an engine of growth and revenue, you have to make it a process.” (download)

Thought-Provoking

Quartz: If you want to be a better person, find something to do outside of work
“Our hobbies tell a great deal about us and our world: about how we choose to present our lives to others; about the burdensome, expectation-freighted nature of free time; about our slippery relationship with the exigencies of productivity in late-capitalist society. Hobbies are a corner of our existence over which we have the impression of control, a sphere in which we feel we can achieve a kind of mastery usually denied to us in our wider personal and professional lives.” (read)

25iq: A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Elon Musk About Business and Investing
“fundamental to a successful business is making really great products that people want to buy. Great products in this context means that they are not just a little better than what competitors sell or that people already have, but a lot better. This simple fact seems so obvious, but some people get so caught up in trying to “start a company,” that they don’t pay enough attention to creating the products that define the business.” (read)

Buffer: We’ve Made 10 Layoffs. How We Got Here, the Financial Details and How We’re Moving Forward
“It’s the result of the biggest mistake I’ve made in my career so far. Even worse, this wasn’t the result of a market change—it was entirely self-inflicted.” (read)

Jon Westenberg on Medium: Teach kids to code. They’ll change the world
“I’d call code the great equalizer, if its distribution as a skill set weren’t so unequal.” (read)

By / About FreshBooks

Kiley Meehan on Medium: How Selling Breakfast Pastries Helped My Team Design a Better Product
“Here are a few ways that recreating real-world scenarios helped us design a better product” (read)

A Little Levity 🙂

CBC: ‘Thought Leader’ gives talk about ‘Thought Leadership’ that will inspire your thoughts
“In 2005, I met another ‘thought leader’ and I asked him how he became a ‘thought leader’ and he said ‘I don’t know.’ It was then that I knew I could be one too.” (watch)